Cal. Dems Claim To Protect Kids While Hiding Gender ‘Transitions’ From Parents

 While Governor Gavin Newsom touts his new social media law as a landmark achievement for protecting kids online, California Democrats’ recent voting record indicates that safeguarding kids is not a priority for Newsom or his party.  

Senate Bill 976 (introduced by Democrat Nancy Skinner), which Newsom signed into law last month, bans online platforms from “knowingly providing” addictive content feeds to minors “without parental consent.” In a statement accompanying the bill signing, Newsom bragged, “With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits. I thank Senator Skinner for advancing this important legislation that puts children’s well-being first.” 

While Newsom’s backing of the bill made headlines, the Democrat majority has refused to consider numerous other child protection proposals this legislative session and has even pushed through one bill that puts many young people at risk. The party has not earned its rhetoric as a champion of children’s well-being.

A notable example is SB 1435 (introduced by Republican Ochoa Bogh), which sought to support the removal of obscene materials from K-8 classrooms and school libraries by aligning California law with federal broadcasting standards. This innocuous bill to make educational environments safer for young students failed to pass beyond the Senate Education Committee. Three Democrat senators opposed the measure, dismissing it as a “book-banning” bill.

Yet if materials are deemed inappropriate for a general audience under federal broadcasting rules, it stands to reason they should also be considered inappropriate for children, especially in K-8 educational settings. Another bill, AB 3080 (introduced by Republican Juan Alanis), proposed to strengthen online protections for children by requiring businesses that offer products or services that are illegal for minors, such as pornography, to verify users’ age with government-issued ID.

Despite passing unanimously in the Assembly and facing no opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee, AB 3080 was halted by the Senate Appropriations Committee chaired by Democrat Sen. Anna Caballero, who effectively killed the bill by leaving it on the committee’s suspense file. 

But Democrats’ greatest hypocrisy by far is claiming to care about “parental consent” when it comes to online content as they work overtime to kill the parental notification policies enacted by local school boards. These policies arose after a growing number of parents reported that schools were lying to them about their children changing their names and gender at school.

One particularly egregious example occurred in the Newport-Mesa school district in Orange County, where last year a parental rights group “obtained hundreds of pages of emails and documents” showing that the district was involved in the social gender “transitioning” of 23 students — “eight of them elementary school age” — without informed parental consent from 2020 to 2022. 

In response to incidents like these, over a dozen California school districts passed policies requiring schools to notify parents of any changes to their child’s official or unofficial records. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has targeted school districts that adopted these policies, most notably suing Chino Valley Unified for implementing the first parental notification policy. Litigation on this issue continues in several cases in both state and federal court.

Rather than waiting for ongoing litigation to resolve, Democrats in the legislature pushed through AB 1955 (introduced by Democrat Chris Ward), which bans districts from adopting parental notification policies, and ostensibly allows school districts to create and maintain separate — and often secret — files or “unofficial records” for students, intentionally concealing information from parents. 

But AB 1955 defies federal law that requires parents to have complete access to their children’s school records at all times. Legal challenges to the new law are expected before it goes into effect in January.

How can Democrats champion parental involvement for online platforms but condemn it when it comes to something as life-altering as gender “transitioning?”

Will O’Neill, mayor of Newport Beach, captured the absurdity of the Democrats’ stance perfectly: “In other words, [Attorney General Rob Bonta] wants a kid to get parent consent before joining Instagram, but not before changing gender.”

California voters should recognize the gap between the Democrats’ rhetoric on the new social media law and their actions when it comes to protecting children. They want to be seen as staunch champions of children’s safety. But this image crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

Andrew Davenport is a policy and research associate with the California Policy Center and a Young Voices contributor.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/07/california-democrats-claim-to-protect-kids-while-hiding-gender-transitions-from-parents/

What a Trump presidency can mean for health care

 by Vinay Prasad

Trump has won a decisive victory and most Americans think the country is on the wrong track. RFK Jr and Casey and Calley Means have been called in to help advise Trump about health care. While some have expressed concern about past statements by Mr. Kennedy, there are several avenues of reform that I believe everyone can agree with.

1. Conflict of interest has to go. One reason the American health care system is so broken is doctors take money from Pharma, FDA officials go to work for Pharma, Big agriculture lobbies congress.

Rules limiting the revolving door. An expansion of the Sunshine act to include prohibitions against taking pharma money and serving on FDA committees or working for compendia would be great ideas.

2. The CDC is an abject failure. The agency— to this day— says that 2 year olds need to wear masks, and that babies need covid boosters. These recommendations lack randomized data and are wrong. The CDC should be split into 2 agencies. One in charge of tracking statistics, and the other with a policy advisory role. The agency needs to lose ~10000 employees, as it is bloated and needing a hair cut.

3. The NIH is a failure. It has never tested how to give grant money. We have no idea if the current system is better than modified lottery or other proposal. It has no interest in data transparency, publishing in timely fashion, and reproducibility. The agency also needs a hair cut, and a leader who understands these concerns.

4. The FDA is a failure. It rubber stamps too many useless products. It needs to either remove itself from the picture, or demand randomized trials measuring appropriate endpoints.

5. CMS should stop paying for things that don’t work. 5% of the CMS budget should be to run randomized trials to identify interventions that don’t work.

6. Children’s nutrition. RFK Jr is correct. Children are served dog food in school. They need to be be served good, nutritious food ala Japan and France.

7. Processed food. I tend to agree that America eats too much processed food, and merely removing subsidies could change these habits. The Means discuss this well.

8. Repeal vaccine indemnification. Alex Berenson is 100% right here

9. Fire Peter Marks at FDA. He was responsible for the departure of Gruber and Krause and has displayed a reckless attitude to drug regulation. He is actively trying to lower the bar for gene therapy.

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/what-a-trump-presidency-can-mean

We can’t just say ‘We’re all Americans in the end’ and pretend everything is okay

 Back in July after the first Trump assassination attempt, I wrote that there can be no national unity, no burying the hatchet or cooling the rhetoric with people who have been encouraging political violence and pushing assassination prep for years. You can’t smack someone in the face with a hammer and then insist everyone calm down.

Trump’s election victory doesn’t change that. Those in the news media who spent years calling Trump a fascist and comparing him to Hitler, claiming he represents a threat to democracy and that he’ll use his presidential powers to go after his enemies, should not be forgiven. Their lies and nonstop propaganda should not be forgotten. No one should ever take them seriously again. When they try to engage the public square, they should either be ignored entirely or met with a wall of mockery and derision. They are enemies of the American people, whom they openly despise, and there can be no real unity with them no matter what they might say in the future.

Going forward, it should be a mark of shame to be associated with MSNBC, CBS News, and CNN. Same goes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Politico. All the “prestige” media outlets that perpetrated lies, distortions, and unhinged rhetoric about Trump should lose so much credibility that their reader and viewer bases collapse, advertisers abandon them, and they get broken up and sold off for parts. If Laurene Powell Jobs wants to run a vanity magazine for her own entertainment, fine. But let’s not pretend it’s a serious place where serious journalists work. We all know what it is now.

Legacy media outlets, the polling industry, the Democrat-funded nonprofits and the academics and activists who run them have all now been exposed as cogs in a giant propaganda machine. Kamala Harris was never ahead. She never had a chance of winning. There was no “joy.” She wasn’t “brat.” She didn’t even win the Democrat Party nomination, it was handed to her in a backroom deal. She isn’t relatable or cool, she’s the most cringey and fake person ever to run for president. Corporate media and the Democrats ran a massive psy-op on the American people to make them believe something that wasn’t true. And it failed. We should never forget that these people will say anything for the sake of power, so we should never trust them again.

For the government officials and institutions who tried to bankrupt and jail Trump, there should be more severe and formal consequences. On Wednesday it was reported that the Justice Department will be dismissing Special Counsel Jack Smith and dropping his cases against Trump before Trump takes office. That’s great, but Smith should not be allowed to simply walk away. He and everyone else at Biden’s DOJ who was involved in these lawfare cases against Trump needs to be investigated and held accountable for their actions.

And of course the problem goes far beyond Smith. What the Justice Department and the FBI did to Trump was one of the most egregious abuses of power in American history, and we shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at it because Trump won. These agencies need to be dismantled entirely and re-built from scratch. The FBI in particular has shown itself to be an enemy of the American people and a danger to the republic. Its director, Christopher Wray, should not simply be allowed to resign. He should be removed and placed under criminal investigation. 

Same goes for New York Attorney General Leticia James, whose lawfare against Trump is an ongoing scandal. James said on Wednesday that her office is preparing to “fight back” against the incoming Trump administration. She should be disbarred, at a minimum for trying to bankrupt Trump with a bogus fraud case in which there were no fraud victims. 

Then there’s Liz Cheney, who in her role as vice chair of the Jan. 6 Committee has been accused of inducing witness perjury, destroying documents, and suppressing exonerating evidence. Cheney posted what seemed like a message of conciliation on X Tuesday night, saying we must accept the results of the election. But she shouldn’t get off so easily either. Her role in the Jan. 6 Committee should be fully investigated and she should face criminal charges if warranted.

The truth is, if Trump hadn’t won he’d be going to prison. For supporting Trump, Elon Musk would have been targeted by the government, bankrupted, and subjected to years of lawfare. The people who howled loudest about Trump weaponizing the government against his political opponents have spent years doing just that to Trump and his associates.

The idea that we should just forget all that now for the sake of unity is deeply misguided and naïve. If those responsible aren’t held accountable, they will never stop trying to destroy their enemies by any means they can. Before we ever achieve anything like unity in America again, there must be a reckoning and there must be justice. Without those things, the divisions in our country won’t be able to heal. 

Even with a reckoning, unity will be difficult. We can’t just say “Oh well we’re all Americans in the end.” That won’t cut it. The stark reality is that there are a large number of our countrymen who are no longer Americans in any meaningful sense. As Glenn Ellmers has written, they “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

After those who broke the law are held accountable, and those who lied are ostracized and ignored, we will still face the problem of disunity and division among our people. We will still be two nations occupying the same territory, with two irreconcilable visions of what the country should be. We can’t paper over those differences, and we shouldn’t.

To achieve real and lasting unity we’ll need a counter-revolution in America, a re-founding of the country. That in turn will require a conversion of the American people and a return to the ideals, principles, and way of life that made our republic possible in the first place.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/07/after-trumps-victory-there-can-be-no-unity-without-a-reckoning/

2 More Election Takeaways...

 by John Hinderaker

This year’s election exposed the relative insignificance of two of the main pillars of the Democratic Party: money and control over the press. Thirty or forty years ago, it might have been impossible to overcome a much better-funded opponent who was supported by virtually 100% of what then constituted the press. In 2024, Donald Trump was able to blow past those once-formidable obstacles.

First, money. Financial resources are obviously significant. A candidate in any race needs enough money to get his messages out. But there is considerable evidence that in today’s world, a point of diminishing returns is often reached.

It is hard to reconstruct all of the dollars that are spent on a presidential race, because there are so many different sources of funds. But I don’t think there is any doubt that Kamala Harris vastly outspent Donald Trump:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has given Democrats a substantive fundraising lead, with last-minute federal filings released ahead of Election Day suggesting her campaign is maintaining a massive lead over former President Donald Trump in the final days of the race….

The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available….
***
The Harris Victory Fund—which raises money for both Harris’ campaign and Democratic groups—raised $1.2 billion this election cycle, according to a FEC filing released on Oct. 24.

Trumps National Committee JFC, which raises money for Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, took in only $375.3 million during this election cycle, while the ex-president’s Trump 47 Committee, a different joint fundraising committee that collects funds from bigger donors, raised $327.5 million.

While Harris had already garnered a fundraising lead over Trump, her donations shot up in September: NBC News first reported that Harris and affiliated committees had passed the $1 billion mark since she entered the race based on her September fundraising….

All of that money availed Harris little. The largest share goes for television advertising, but when the candidate does not have a compelling message, more TV ads do nothing to persuade voters. Probably the most effective campaign spending goes for on the ground staff, get out the vote efforts, and so on. But both candidates had plenty of resources for the essentials. At the margin, more money accomplished little.

Similarly, the Democrats’ control over what used to be called the “mainstream” press is an asset that has been steadily depreciating for the last 20 years. This is where we at Power Line came in: we played a role in exposing the falsehoods about George W. Bush that were propagated by 60 Minutes and CBS News during the 2024 campaign. That was one of the first of many serious blows to the credibility of the “mainstream” press.

At this point, that credibility, and the influence that goes with it, are gone. Outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the Associated Press, and so on, are correctly viewed as mouthpieces for the Democratic Party. I usually refer to them as the Democratic Party press or the liberal press, which is how most people see them.

Some of these outlets still claim to have some kind of authority, stemming from their purported objectivity or expertise. But no one believes it. Reporters, editors and talking heads have revealed themselves as partisan, dishonest hacks so many times that their cover is blown, and what they say persuades almost no one.

This doesn’t mean that controlling the Times, the Post, the AP, etc., is of no value. But the value of those outlets lies pretty much exclusively in preaching to the far-left choir. They can roil and motivate the Democrats’ base, but they can’t do much else.

This year’s election showed how much more effectively persuadable voters can be reached by going to them directly, through interviews, podcasts and events. No one really cares what the New York Times thinks of Donald Trump–we all know the Times hates him–but listening to Trump talk with a podcaster like Joe Rogan at length, not in the snippets or even sentence fragments so often broadcast on the “news,” is vastly more effective. As is watching Trump and his supporters at an event like the Madison Square Garden rally.

The people who run the Democratic Party are well aware that in Kamala Harris, they were saddled with an inadequate candidate. I am not sure they equally understand how far the structures on which they they have long depended have been weakened.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/11/two-more-takeaways.php

Levi Strauss Heir Leads San Francisco Mayor's Race

 by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Daniel Lurie, a philanthropist and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, appears poised to oust San Francisco Mayor London Breed in her bid for reelection, as the city continued to post election results on Nov. 6.

(Left) San Francisco mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie speaks during a campaign meet and greet event in San Francisco on Oct. 30, 2024. (Right) San Francisco Mayor London Breed speaks with locals in San Francisco on Oct. 22, 2022. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Lurie led Breed by 12 points Wednesday morning, earning 56 percent of the vote, compared to the incumbent’s 44 percent.

Breed has not yet conceded, but told supporters Tuesday she would wait until all votes were counted.

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” she told supporters at an election night party Tuesday, according to wire reports.

She noted she was also behind in her first race for mayor in 2019, but won the office. Breed is the first black woman to serve as mayor of San Francisco.

The county has not yet certified the results and planned to issue preliminary numbers around 4 p.m. Thursday, according to the Department of Elections.

The county is still processing about 157,000 ballots, most of which are vote-by-mail ballots received Monday and Tuesday by mail and at polling places, the elections department reported in a press release provided to The Epoch Times Wednesday.

The county also has to process 20,000 provisional ballots cast at polling locations by voters whose names are not on the voter registration list.

The county may take up to 30 days after Elections Day to certify the final election results, according to the department.

The mayor’s challenger signaled that he is ready to get to work, according to a letter to his supporters posted on social media and his website.

Lurie thanked his supporters in the letter Tuesday night, saying the city was ready for change.

“Over the past 13 months, I’ve had the great experience of meeting with San Franciscans in every corner of our city,” Lurie wrote. “I heard your frustrations but also your hope and desire to write our next chapter.”

He added it was time for leadership rooted in “true public service, one that puts the people of San Francisco above all else.”

The candidate spent more than $9 million of his own money in the race to replace Breed. He raised more than $16 million, according to financial reports.

Lurie is the son of Rabbi Brian Lurie and Miriam “Mimi” Lurie Haas. His parents divorced when he was a child and Lurie’s mother subsequently married Peter Haas, a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss.

Haas is a billionaire and one of the largest shareholders of Levi Strauss & Co.

Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, opened a dry goods company in San Francisco at the height of the California Gold Rush in 1853, according to the company. Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis created blue jeans in 1873 to meet the needs of miners, cowboys, and workers at the time.

Lurie is the founder and CEO of Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco nonprofit launched in 2005 that raises money and helps educate, employ, house, and support impoverished people in the Bay Area, according to his biography.

Breed is a native San Franciscan who was raised by her grandmother in the city’s public housing. She has spent much of her efforts during the last year responding to retail, tech, hotel, and corporate departures from the city.

Union Square visitors look at damage to a Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco on Nov. 21, 2021. Danielle Echeverria/San Francisco Chronicle via AP

She supported two successful public safety ballot measures passed in March—propositions E and F—to expand police powers and compel some drug users to enter treatment.

Multiple companies have shuttered businesses in the once-thriving City by the Bay in recent years, with some citing the increase in retail theft, homelessness, and open-air drug use.

Most recently, San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot during an attempted robbery in the city’s downtown Union Square in August. Pearsall survived the shooting.

Breed did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday and her campaign has not released a public statement after results started rolling in.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/levi-strauss-heir-leads-san-francisco-mayors-race

US judge rules against Biden legalization program for immigrant spouses

  A U.S. judge in Texas on Thursday ruled against President Joe Biden's program offering a path to citizenship for certain immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens, a blow that could keep the program blocked through Biden's final months in office.

U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker found the program, which offers a path to citizenship to around 500,000 immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally if they are married to U.S. citizens, exceeded Biden's executive authority.

The initiative, known as Keeping Families Together, launched in August but was blocked days later by Barker, who left it frozen while he considered a legal challenge brought by Texas and a coalition of U.S. states with Republican attorneys general.

Biden, a Democrat, announced the program in June before dropping out of the presidential race and paving the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to face Republican Donald Trump, an immigration hardliner. 

Trump defeated Harris in Tuesday's election and is expected to launch a wide-ranging immigration crackdown that would likely include rolling back Biden's initiative for immigrant spouses, which the Trump campaign called a "mass amnesty" that would encourage illegal immigration.

Americans see immigration as the most pressing issue for Trump to address when he takes office in January, and a large majority believe he will order mass deportations of people living in the U.S. illegally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Thursday found.

The Biden administration could appeal Thursday's court ruling. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/US-judge-rules-against-Biden-legalization-program-for-immigrant-spouses-48298206/

Duke Energy Considers Making Coal Power Great Again Under Trump

 In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Duke Energy Chief Financial Officer Brian Savoy explained how a Trump victory could roll back climate regulations on power generation at utility plants, just as electricity demand soars due to newly built artificial intelligence data centers. Meanwhile, Democrats, wearing climate crisis blinders, have pushed disastrous de-growth 'green' policies removing fossil fuel generation from the grid, resulting in shockingly high power prices for some customers - and even causing power crisis in some parts of the Mid-Atlantic.

CFO Savoy told Bloomberg that he would reexamine plans to convert some coal-fired power generation units in Indiana to natural gas. He said that in a deregulated environment under Trump, dual conversion, known as switching power plants or industrial boilers from coal to NatGas, would "make sense" in Indiana, adding there's even a chance some power generation units would remain coal-burning. 

Trump is expected to reverse Biden-Harris' far-left climate policies, which have acted as an economic muzzle on the US economy. At the same time, China built a record number of coal plants that fed cheap power to factories, essentially making US companies unable to compete with Chinese ones in international markets. Trump may focus on rolling back greenhouse gas emission controls on the gas, oil, coal, power, and auto sectors.

Following the victory on Wednseday, American Energy Alliance congratulated the former President and said it was excited to "unwind the Biden-Harris administration's regulatory onslaught on American energy producers."

"Throughout his campaign, President Trump expressed his unabashed support for American energy," IER and AEA President Thomas Pyle told Utility Dive in a statement.

Pyle continued, "He promised to embrace domestic oil and gas production, lower energy and electricity prices, and undo the inflationary Biden-Harris Green New Deal policies, especially the wasteful taxpayer-funded subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act."

There's no denying that another Trump presidency will slow the energy transition to a more sensible speed, as the current trajectory puts the nation on a crash course with power inflation amid all the new power demand from AI data centers.

With Republicans in charge of the Senate, the White House, and potentially the House, Trump will move quickly to deregulate the power industry and lower energy costs for Americans by restarting fossil fuel power generators. Trump must also continue the revival of America's nuclear power plants. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/duke-energy-considers-making-coal-power-great-again-under-trump